The Civil War and Reconstruction [Second Edition]

By Prof. J. G. Randall and Prof. David Donald

This is a revised edition by David Herbert Donald of his former professor J. G. Randall’s book The Civil War and Reconstruction, which was originally published in 1937 and had long been regarded as “the standard work in its field”, serving as a useful basic Civil War reference tool for general readers and textbook for college classes. This Second Edition retains many of the original chapters, “such as those treating border-state problems, non-military developments during the war, intellectual tendencies, anti-war efforts, religious and educational movements, and propaganda methods […] bearing evidence of Mr. Randall’s thoroughgoing exploration of the manuscripts and archives,” whilst it expands considerably on other original chapters, such as those relating to the Confederacy. Still other portions have been entirely recast or rewritten, such as the pre-war period chapters and Reconstruction chapters, reflecting factual updates since Randall’s original publication. A must-read for all Civil War students and scholars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
• Release date: Aug 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787200272

Prof. J. G. Randall

Prof. James Garfield Randall (June 4, 1881 in Indianapolis, Indiana - February 1953) was an American historian specializing on Abraham Lincoln and the era of the American Civil War. He taught at the University of Illinois (1920-1950), where David Herbert Donald was one of his students and continued his work. Prof. David Herbert Donald (October 1, 1920 - May 17, 2009) was an American historian, best known for his acclaimed 1995 biography of Abraham Lincoln. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for earlier works; he published more than 30 books on United States political and literary figures and the history of the American South.

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Text originally published in 1953 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION

BY

J. G. RANDALL

Late Professor of History, University of Illinois

AND

DAVID DONALD

Professor of History, The Johns Hopkins University

Maps By Russell Lenz

SECOND EDITION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 6

PREFACE 7

MAPS AND GRAPHS 10

ILLUSTRATIONS 11

THE DIVIDED UNION 14

CHAPTER 1—A Growing Nation 14

CHAPTER 2—The Old South 39

CHAPTER 3—Slavery 57

CHAPTER 4—Wedges of Separation 82

CHAPTER 5—A House Divided 105

CHAPTER 6—Secession of the Lower South 122

CHAPTER 7—Buchanan’s Dilemma 135

CHAPTER 8—Lincoln and the Appeal to Arms 152

CHAPTER 9—The Plight of the Upper South 166

CHAPTER 10—The Campaigns: Earlier Phases 175

CHAPTER 11—The Virginia Front 191

CHAPTER 12—The Great Border 208

CHAPTER 13—Problems of the Confederacy 266

CHAPTER 14—Behind the Southern Lines 277

CHAPTER 15—Men and Measures 292

CHAPTER 16—The Government and the Citizen 308

CHAPTER 17—The Raising of the Army 322

CHAPTER 18—Army Administration 335

CHAPTER 19—The War Treasury 348

CHAPTER 20—The American Question Abroad 360

CHAPTER 21—Slavery and the War 373

CHAPTER 22—Lincoln and Emancipation 381

CHAPTER 23—The Middle Phase: Gettysburg, Vicksburg,, Chattanooga 398

CHAPTER 24—Military Campaigns of 1864 416

CHAPTER 25—The Naval War 478

CHAPTER 26—Wartime Politics to 1864 492

CHAPTER 27—Peace Movements and the Election of 1864 503

CHAPTER 28—The North in Wartime 514

CHAPTER 29—The Failure of Cotton Diplomacy 532

CHAPTER 30—Collapse of the Confederacy: End of the War 546

THE RESTORED UNION 562

CHAPTER 31—Presidential Reconstruction 562

CHAPTER 32—Johnson and the Radicals 588

CHAPTER 33—The Critical Year 596

CHAPTER 34—The Fabric of Reconstruction Legislation 611

CHAPTER 35—The President Impeached 619

CHAPTER 36—Black Reconstruction 634

CHAPTER 37—Post-war Politics and Constitutional Change 646

CHAPTER 38—The Grant Era 663

CHAPTER 39—The End of Reconstruction 686

BIBLIOGRAPHY 706

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 806

DEDICATION

FOR

BRUCE RANDALL DONALD

PREFACE

For a generation J. G. Randall’s The Civil War and Reconstruction has been the standard work in its field. From its first publication in 1937 it has usefully served as a basic reference tool, as the best one-volume history of the Civil War for general readers, and as a textbook for college classes. It is a remarkable book, notable for its accuracy, its comprehensiveness, and its readability. Many of its chapters, such as those treating border-state problems, non-military developments during the war, intellectual tendencies, anti-war efforts, religious and educational movements, and propaganda methods, are strikingly original, bearing evidence of Mr. Randall’s thoroughgoing exploration of the manuscripts and archives. All of it reflected the latest and best scholarship at the time it was written.

In the last twenty-four years, however, there has been a tremendous outpouring of books and articles on the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Though much of this literature has been trivial and repetitious, some of this writing has basically changed our view of the period. Professor Randall himself was aware that The Civil War and Reconstruction was gradually coming to be out of date, and he often expressed a desire to revise it. He did, in fact, add a supplementary bibliography for the 1953 printing, but he never had the time to give the whole book the thorough reworking which he thought called for.

Feeling it a great pity that such an important and useful work should become obsolete, the publishers and Mrs. Randall invited me to revise the book. Trying to keep in mind the high scholarly standards of the great teacher under whom it was once my privilege to study, I have done so.

Readers who have used the older version of Mr. Randall’s book are entitled to know something about this process of revision and to inquire what kinds of changes have been made. I have had an entirely free hand to make any alterations that might seem desirable. The publishers, Mrs. Randall, and I all recognize that, had Mr. Randall lived to make his own revisions, the result might be different from the present work—but we also know that, with his characteristic generosity and open-mindedness, he undoubtedly would defend my right to make changes which I have made.

My purpose has simply been to bring Mr. Randall’s work abreast of the best contemporary scholarship. In so doing, I have changed his words only where it seemed necessary. For instance, where his account of a battle is soundly based upon such original sources as the Official Records and Battles and Leaders, I have altered neither text nor footnotes just to prove that I am acquainted with similar treatments of the same engagement in Douglas S. Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants or Kenneth P. William’s Lincoln Finds a General. The bibliography takes care of that problem.

In many chapters I have made no substantial changes. Mr. Randall’s treatment of constitutional developments, for example, remains virtually untouched, for there has been little additional research in this field. On many other topics as well Mr. Randall’s work has successfully stood the test of time. A great deal of recent Civil War scholarship has been, in effect, the exploring of leads and ideas which Mr. Randall put forward in this book, and usually the explorations have merely documented the theses of the master historian.

Other chapters have been considerably expanded, so as to include the findings of recent important scholarship. In particular, there has been such a great amount of significant writing on the Confederacy during the past quarter of a century that I have more than doubled the length of the sections devoted to the wartime South.

Still other portions of the book, which appeared very much out of date, have been entirely recast or rewritten. The chapters on the pre-war period, for example, have been considerably changed, both in factual content and in thesis, and the Reconstruction chapters have been largely rewritten.

As a result of these alterations, the second edition of The Civil War and Reconstruction differs in a number of ways from its predecessor. First of all, the present book is less pro-Southern than was Mr. Randall’s original manuscript. In part this change reflects the fact that recent scholars have minimized the exotic and romantic aspects of the Old South and have stressed its frontier crudity and harshness. In part, no doubt, it stems from the fact that Mr. Randall, as a Northerner, tried very hard to be fair to a section to which he did not belong, while I, as a Mississippian, feel both proud of my Southern heritage and aware of its deficiencies.

A second major difference will be found in the elimination from the present edition of most of the discussion as to the repressibility of the Civil War. To the present generation of historians the question of the inevitability of the conflict seems largely a semantic one, on which, as Pieter Geyl has said, the historian can never form any but an ambivalent opinion. Clearly had Jefferson Davis and the Confederates been willing to submit without fighting, there would have been no war; similarly, had Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans been willing to acquiesce in secession, there would have been none either. The real question, therefore, becomes not to determine whether the war was inevitable but to ascertain how and when attitudes became so hardened as to make peaceful adjustment impossible.

It will be apparent that the present edition is less a personal document than was its predecessor. Professor Randall, a very great scholar doing pioneer work in the field, felt it necessary to give his considered verdict on all the disputed points in the Civil War story. My purpose, instead, has been to indicate the present state of research and, where the scholars are in disagreement, to sketch the nature of and the reasons for their controversy. Thus the original edition of this work contained a strong brief for George B. McClellan’s generalship; the present version relates the charges which military historians have brought against the general and the defenses that other students—including Mr. Randall himself—have raised for him.

The most striking changes in this new edition occur in the section on Reconstruction—a section of whose inadequacies, incidentally, Mr. Randall often spoke to me. Trying to treat Reconstruction more as a national than as a sectional problem, I have given additional space to business consolidation, to labor unrest, and to farm movements in the period. Drawing heavily upon the research of my own graduate students, I have rejected the economic interpretation of the Reconstruction period in favor of a more complex pattern of inter-group rivalry. For the Southern states during the Reconstruction years I have taken full advantage of the important revisionist work that has been completed in recent years and have tried to show Negroes, carpetbaggers, and scalawags in a fuller, and I hope fairer, light. If the result has been to shatter some illusions about the Southern white Bourbons, my purpose has not been to single them out for attack but to show them as part of the whole tawdry age.

Yet if this second edition is in some ways a substantially different book from the first, I hope that it has not, basically, been too drastically altered. I have approached the subject in the same eclectic spirit in which Mr. Randall worked, riding no theory as a hobby horse and adopting no interpretation simply because it is new. As Mr. Randall wrote in the preface to the original work, a cautious historian may well choose to record the event, not indeed without interpretation, but without committing himself to a particular formula of determinism, or, indeed, to any hypothesis. I have also continued to adhere to Mr. Randall’s belief that—contrary to a good deal of the popular literature on the subject—military history is only one important aspect of the Civil War, deserving no fuller attention than, say, wartime finance or diplomacy. And, finally, I hope that I have written no word that can be interpreted as a glorification of the war. In this centennial year of the firing on Fort Sumter we cannot too often be reminded that, as Mr. Randall always believed, the Civil War, for all its heroism and devotion, was an immeasurable tragedy for the nation.

David Donald

MAPS AND GRAPHS

POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES, 1850

POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES, 1860

RAILROAD MILEAGE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1850 AND 1860

RAILROADS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1860

FREE-COLORED POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES, 1850 AND 1860

DISTRIBUTION OF SLAVE POPULATION, 1850

SLAVEHOLDERS IN 1860

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1860

CHARLESTON HARBOR

SECESSION

MAIN AREA OF EASTERN CAMPAIGNS, 1861-1865

MAIN AREA OF WESTERN CAMPAIGNS, 1861-1862

THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN

THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM, SEPTEMBER 17, 1862

THE PARTITION OF VIRGINIA

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG: THE THIRD DAY, JULY 3, 1863

THE BATTLE OF MURFREESBORO, DECEMBER 31, 1862

THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN

THE AREA OF CHATTANOOGA

THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN

THE VICINITY OF RICHMOND, 1864-1865

SHERMAN’S MARCH TO THE SEA

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1864

ENLISTMENTS IN THE UNION ARMY AND NAVY

ILLUSTRATIONS

DANIEL WEBSTER

HENRY CLAY

CHARLES SUMNER

ROGER B. TANEY

JOHN C. CALHOUN

A REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN BROADSIDE OF 1856

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS

JEFFERSON DAVIS

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

A UNION VOLUNTEER

PIERRE GUSTAVE TOUTANT BEAUREGARD

CONFEDERATE WINTER QUARTERS, CENTERVILLE, VIRGINIA, MARCH, 1862

FEDERAL WAGON PARK AT YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA

FEDERAL ARTILLERY PARK AT YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA

GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN

PURSUING THE CONFEDERATE TROOPS AFTER THE EVACUATION OF YORKTOWN

FEDERAL THIRTEEN-INCH MORTARS NEAR YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA, MAY, 1862

PROFESSOR T. S. C. LOWE OBSERVING THE BATTLE OF FAIR OAKS

THOMAS J. (STONEWALL) JACKSON

ROBERT E. LEE

WHITE OAK SWAMP

THE BATTLE OF SHILOH

CLEMENT L. VALLANDIGHAM

AN ANTI-LINCOLN CARTOON

COMPANY E, 4TH U.S. COLORED INFANTRY, AT FORT LINCOLN

CONTRABANDS AT CUMBERLAND, VIRGINIA, MAY, 1862

NEGROES COMING INTO FEDERAL CAMP AFTER THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

JAMES M. MASON

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS

HORACE GREELEY

WILLIAM H. SEWARD

EDWIN M. STANTON

SALMON F. CHASE

UNION SCOUTS OBSERVING LEE’S TROOPS CROSSING THE POTOMAC, SEPTEMBER, 1862

PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND GENERAL McCLELLAN AT ANTIETAM, AROUND OCTOBER 2, 1862

THE FEDERAL SIGNAL TELEGRAPH TRAIN AT THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG

GOING TO THE TRENCHES—FEDERAL TROOPS IN 1862

HENRY W. HALLECK

AMBROSE E. BURNSIDE

BURNSIDE’S MUD MARCH, JANUARY 21, 1863

LAST STAND OF PICKETT’S MEN, GETTYSBURG, 1863

GEORGE E. PICKETT

JAMES LONGSTREET

J. E. B. STUART

BODIES OF THE DEAD IN THE WHEATFIELD, BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

GEORGE G. MEADE

ULYSSES S. GRANT

BENJAMIN F. BUTLER

DAVID G. FARRAGUT

ANDREW H. FOOTE

FARRAGUT’S FLEET ASCENDING THE MISSISSIPPI, APRIL 17, 1862

GIDEON WELLES

WRECK OF A BLOCKADE RUNNER OFF SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA

DECK VIEW OF THE U.S.S. MONITOR

CONFEDERATE IRONCLAD RAM STONEWALL AT WASHINGTON, D.C., JUNE, 1865

THE C.S.S. ALABAMA AND THE BRILLIANTE

NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS’ MESS, COMPANY D, 93RD NEW YORK INFANTRY, NEAR BEALTON, VIRGINIA, AUGUST, 1863

HEADQUARTERS, 1ST BRIGADE, U.S. HORSE ARTILLERY, BRANDY STATION, VIRGINIA, FEBRUARY, I 864

CONFEDERATES OPENING FIRE UPON FEDERAL CAVALRY AT REED’S BRIDGE OVER THE CHICKAMAUGA

GEORGE H. THOMAS

FEDERAL TROOPS EXAMINING PASSES AT GEORGETOWN FERRY

PHILIP H. SHERIDAN

WILLIAM T. SHERMAN

PULPIT ROCK, THE SUMMIT OF LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN

TWO SCENES OF THE BATTLE OF KENNESAW MOUNTAIN, JUNE 27, 1864

PALISADES AND CHEVAUX-DE-FRISE GUARDING ATLANTA

JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON

JOHN B. HOOD

WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN: FEDERAL PONTOON BRIDGE ACROSS THE NORTH ANNA RIVER, MAY, 1864

BRIGADIER GENERAL FRANCIS BARLOW’S CHARGE AT COLD HARBOR, JUNE 3, 1864

CONFEDERATE SOLDIER OF EWELL’S CORPS KILLED IN ATTACK OF MAY 19, 1864

DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGN POSTER, 1864

REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN POSTER, 1864

PENNSYLVANIA SOLDIERS VOTING AT HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF THE JAMES, 1864

ENGINE OF U.S. MILITARY RAILROAD AT CITY POINT, VIRGINIA

THE LAST TRAIN FROM ATLANTA

SHERMAN REVIEWING HIS ARMY ON BAY STREET, SAVANNAH, DECEMBER, 1864

RUINS OF CHARLESTON

CONFEDERATE FORTIFICATIONS AROUND PETERSBURG

FEDERAL THIRTEEN-INCH MORTAR DICTATOR IN FRONT OF PETERSBURG

A DEAD CONFEDERATE SOLDIER

RUINS OF RICHMOND

LEE LEAVING THE McLEAN HOUSE AT APPOMATTOX

CONFEDERATES TAKING THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE TO THE UNION, 1865

EXECUTION OF THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION CONSPIRATORS

A CARTOON AGAINST THE TWEED RING

AN 1872 CARTOON ATTACKING THE LIBERAL REPUBLICANS

THE DIVIDED UNION

CHAPTER 1—A Growing Nation

1

THE UNITED STATES in the 1850’s was a growing nation. A land so vast in extent and so conglomerate in origin naturally was divided by significant local and sectional differences, but it was also united by the fact of its unprecedentedly rapid growth. Change and fluidity were the twin themes of American life, and they affected every aspect of the nation’s economics, social structure, and political organization. There was a veritable poetry of motion about the expansion of the American people in the 1850-1860 decade. Having just acquired 188,520 additional square miles of territory in the 1840’s, they were already beginning to fill up the land from a population that increased 35 per cent every ten years.{1} The decade after 1850 saw the total number of inhabitants of the United States rise from 23,000,000 to 31,000,000. Though all parts of the country were expanding, not all did so with equal rapidity. Minnesota’s population grew by an incredible 2760 per cent in the 1850’s, while Vermont showed an increase of only 0.31 per cent.{2} In general, the sparsely settled Pacific Coast states showed the greatest proportionate growth, but the largest numerical increase came in the great Middle West. The older states of the South and North-east were about equal in population and showed growth rates of 24 and 23 per cent respectively.{3}

Though fecundity was high in that decade, much of the increase came direct from Europe. In the fifties the foreign-born element in the country almost doubled. Numbering 2,210,000 in 1850, it exceeded four million in 1860. All parts of the country were affected by this huge influx. Though the South received fewer immigrants, proportionately, than any other region, by the end of the decade 21 per cent of Savannah’s population was foreign-born, as was 31 per cent of that of Memphis.{4} Far heavier concentrations of the foreign-born appeared in the Middle West, where Wisconsin during this period became almost another Germany and Swedish beginnings in Minnesota suggested to Fredrika Bremer the term New Scandinavia. The East, too, was swamped with immigrants: New York in 1855 contained 469,000 persons born in Ireland and 218,000 born in Germany, and these two groups constituted at the time nearly one-fifth of the Empire State. About 96 per cent of the immigrants entering the United States in the fifties came from the north and west of Europe (chiefly from Germany, Scandinavia, and the British Isles); while the contribution of southern and eastern Europe was negligible.

In the reaction of native America to this wave of foreign settlement there was much of violence and persecution, with inevitable results in the field of politics. While immigrants were being welcomed in the mass and some of the states (notably Wisconsin) were permitting them to vote while aliens, Kentucky showed a strong tendency to deny the vote even to naturalized citizens, and nativism became a veritable craze in certain areas. The thronging immigrants were not only different in language and appearance from native Americans; their outlook and social customs, as in the matter of Sabbath observance, were obviously foreign to the American type. Many of them were Roman Catholics. Of the various anti-Catholic and anti-foreign organizations that made themselves felt in this period the most striking was the Knownothing or American party. In certain localities the American movement amounted to a landslide. The 1855 elections in Maryland gave the Knownothings control of local offices in a majority of the state’s counties, a dear majority of thirty-four in the lower house of the legislature, and four of the state’s six congressmen. In March, 1856, the secret order won control of all branches of the government of New Orleans. The New York legislature in 1855 had a Knownothing speaker. This legislature was predominantly Whig; but sixty of the eighty who composed the Whig caucus had taken the Knownothing oath. By the election of 1854 Massachusetts became virtually a Knownothing state. Every state senator, a large majority of the lower house, and the governor were Knownothings; and the members of this anti-foreign party had no difficulty in putting their candidate, Henry Wilson, into the United States Senate. Organized in 1853, the party obtained in the national election of 1856 a popular vote of 874,000 for its candidate, this being over one-fifth of the total vote. The fact that an ex-President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, accepted nomination by this party, and that such politically influential men as Henry Winter Davis, Andrew Jackson Donelson, Edward Everett, Edward Bates, and John Bell joined the movement, showed how fully the party was associated with sentiments and principles of staunch Americanism. Another fact significant of the times was the close association of the Knownothings with the Whigs. Indeed one of the greatest sources of embarrassment to Whig leaders in this period of party realignment was the uncomfortable necessity of taking a stand for or against the nativists.

2

Despite the abundance of fertile but unoccupied land, the labor of the farm in the United States hardly claimed a majority of those gainfully employed. Of the 5,210,047 white males in the whole country in 1850, only 2,298,870 were reported as engaged in agricultural pursuits.{5} In 1860, of the 8,287,000 whose occupations were given in the census, 3.305.000 were classed as farmers, farm laborers, or planters.{6} Yet a considerable majority of the whole population lived in a rural environment. Only one-eighth of the people lived in cities of eight thousand or over in 1850; by 1860 this proportion had increased to one-sixth. Agrarian influence was powerful; agitation for publicly donated homesteads was running high; and the government was taking an increasing share in agricultural development. The vast structure of the Federal department of agriculture, however, with its experiment stations and its elaborate dissemination of seeds and scientific information, was still in the future. It was in 1862 that the bureau of agriculture was created by Congress; it did not become a department until 1889.

In the decade preceding the Civil War the production of all basic agricultural crops was notably accelerated. Corn production leaped from 592.071.000 to 838,793,000 bushels; wheat, from 100,486,000 to 173.105.000 bushels; cotton, from 2,469,000 to 5,387,000 bales.{7} Illinois may be taken as representative of this fabulous expansion of agriculture. In 1849 the state produced nine million bushels of wheat; in 1859 the output was nearly twenty-four million. In the same period the price per bushel increased from $1.20 to $1.55. Increased immigration, improved transportation, abundance of cheap land, and developments in farm machinery were working a quickened prosperity on the Middle Border. Notable among these factors of growth was the McCormick reaper, produced in 1831, an epochal invention which caused many thousands of farmers to discard harvesting methods that had been in use from time immemorial. Having worked out his invention in Virginia, McCormick enlisted the assistance of the railway magnate William B. Ogden and set up at Chicago a cluster of factory buildings which in the fifties covered 110.000 square feet of floor space. From these buildings over four thousand machines were turned out in a year.{8} The business methods of the McCormick company offered an early example of high-pressure salesmanship. Convincing advertising and easy conditions of payment brought golden returns and the firm was soon netting $300,000 a year, while its founder was hailed as one of the great men of the time, winning honors and profits abroad as well as in America. No General or Consul drawn in a chariot through the streets of Rome [said William H. Seward in 1854]...ever conferred upon mankind benefits so great as he [McCormick] who thus vindicated the genius of our country at the World’s Exhibition of Art in the Metropolis of the British Empire.{9}

In these years the lake ports—Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo—showed enormous activity. In 1851 Milwaukee exported 317.000 bushels of wheat; ten years later its business had grown to thirteen million bushels. For the marketing of the huge grain surplus, methods characteristic of the capitalist system were soon fastened upon the agricultural world. The Merchants Grain Forwarding Association was formed in Chicago in 1857; and speculation was rife both at the Board of Trade and on the curb. There many a fortune of twenty or thirty thousand dollars was made or lost within a few weeks.{10} At the same time the southward traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers was reaching a new peak. Though the railroads were already beginning to be a serious challenge, it was the golden age of steamboating in the Mississippi Valley, and 3566 steamboats arrived at New Orleans alone in 1860.{11} The annual commerce of the Mississippi-Ohio traffic was valued at $140,000,000.{12} Business, like agriculture, was everywhere expanding in the fifties. Though a shrewd critic could have discovered unsound elements in the economy of young America, the tonic effect of increasing markets, European war, expanding wants, technological advance, and widespread exploitation of resources was unmistakable. It was the day of Stewart and his New York palace of merchandise; of the fabulously wealthy Astors; of August Belmont, New York agent of the Rothschilds; of Aspinwall and his Panama Railroad; of Corcoran and Riggs (Washington bankers); of Amos and Abbott Lawrence (Boston merchants); of Moses Grinnell, shipping magnate; of Commodore Vanderbilt, master of sundry steam boat and railway lines. Throw down our merchants ever so flat [wrote a diarist of the period], they roll over once, and spring to their feet again. Knock the stairs from under them, and they will make a ladder of the fragments, and remount.{13} Visiting the palace of labor at Lowell the Scandinavian traveler Miss Bremer, who obviously did not see all, was inspired to rhetorical ecstasy at the glittering lights, the whirr of machines, and the procession of operatives.{14} At Lowell she had but a glimpse into the enterprise of a commercial and manufacturing state whose industry was producing annually nearly $300 per capita. One county in the Bay State (Middlesex) had a taxable valuation of all property in 1860 which exceeded the real estate valuation of the whole state of South Carolina.{15}

Not alone in Massachusetts, but also in Rhode Island and Connecticut, in lower New York, in the Delaware River area, along the Erie Canal, and in the areas of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Chicago, and St. Louis, were found the seats of America’s industrial empire. Massachusetts was especially the seat of textile and shoe production; Maine of lumber mills; the Pittsburgh area of iron and coal; Connecticut of clocks and the ingenious devices of the peddler’s cart. Though the South remained primarily an agricultural region, it too showed a keen interest in manufacturing during the 1850’s. During the decade Southern manufacture of agricultural implements increased by 101 per cent, production of steam engines and machinery grew by 387 per cent, and output of boots and shoes mounted by 80 per cent.{16} Everywhere in the land it was the day of the capitalists, merchant princes, employers of thousands, financial promoters, and dwellers in Fifth Avenue mansions. Technology was moving apace. The Morse magnetic telegraph was invented in 1832 and well extended by the time of the Civil War; the pneumatic the appeared in 1845; the sewing machine and rotary press in 1846; the hydraulic turbine in 1849; the electric locomotive in 1851; the Otis elevator in 1852; the Kelly steel process (later known as the Bessemer process) at about the same time. In the late fifties Cyrus Field was making great headway on his Atlantic cable project. Americans were exulting in the wonder of their contrivances—their heating systems, sleeping cars, river and ocean steamboats, engines, improved plows, Colt revolvers, Goodyear rubber patents, power looms, and typesetting machines. Standardization and technological automatic production were adding a stimulus to economic life which was to go to the root of American philosophy. This was made easier by the fact that the basic maladjustments of the machine age had not developed. Production did not greatly outrun consumption; the laborer was not submerged by the machine; where abuses existed they were often unrealized or tolerated. Under these circumstances the fundamental tenets of the prevailing system of capitalist economy were hardly questioned except by a few doctrinaires and reformers.

In this technological and manufacturing development as well as in agricultural advance the railroad was playing a major part. While in 1850 there were only 8500 miles of railroad in the United States, the mileage in 1860 exceeded thirty thousand.{17} In the fifties over two thousand miles were built per year, construction being especially rapid in the Middle West and along those east-and-west lines which joined the nation’s granary with its ports and hives of industry. New York and Philadelphia now displaced New Orleans as outlets of western trade; for a notable gap in pre-war transportation was the lack of railroad construction in the South and the failure to connect the South with the upper Mississippi Valley. While in the Gulf states railroad mileage increased only from 287 miles to 2200 miles, the increase in the North-west was from 1275 in 1850 to more than ten thousand in 1860. It is of interest to note the states in 1860 that were practically or wholly without railroads. Arkansas had only thirty-eight miles; Kentucky 569 miles (as compared with 2999 for Ohio); Minnesota none; Kansas none; Oregon three miles; California seventy miles.

This forward plunge of railroad building was impulsive and spasmodic rather than methodical. The mania of overbuilding brought competition, rate cutting, and depression in railroad securities, contributing largely to the panic of 1857. Accidents were frequent and travel was expensive and uncomfortable. Other difficulties arose from puritanical crusades against Sunday trains, struggles over the adoption of a standard gauge, annoying changes and long waits between trains, and dependence upon England for much of the technical equipment of the industry.

If one turns to shipping he finds in the fifties the golden age of the American merchant marine. In the whole period prior to the First World War American shipbuilding reached its peak in 1854-1855. During these two years over a million tons of ships were produced on American ways: never again till 1917 was that record equaled. As to sailing ships, their ultimate record for all time was reached in New England and New York in this decade. While in 1800 a vessel of three hundred tons was considered a sizable ship, the greatest of the Yankee clippers of the fifties were fifteen times as large (the Great Republic registering 4555 tons), while their mainmasts towered in the harbor skylines to a height of two hundred feet. With their huge spread of canvas these square-rigged vessels were no less notable for speed than for size.

The day of the clipper began in 1845 when J. W. Griffith’s Rainbow with its daring new design left the ways in the Smith and Dimon yards at New York and disappointed the croakers who had predicted that five minutes after launching it would be at the bottom of the East River. Fifteen years later the rapid decline of these sailing giants had begun. Though brief, the day of the clipper was one of record-breaking achievement in the maritime world. The Rainbow made the round trip from New York to China under wind power only between October and April. The Sea Witch flew over the fifteen thousand miles from New York to San Francisco in ninety-seven days; later the Flying Cloud (created by Donald McKay, Rembrandt of American builders){18} did it in eighty-nine. The Sovereign of the Seas sailed from Honolulu to New York in eighty-two days; the Lightning on her voyage across the Atlantic in 1854 made a day’s run of 436 miles, the longest authenticated days distance ever covered by a wind-propelled vessel, not exceeded even by steam until 1889. In eleven years following 1846 our shipping devoted to international trade increased from 943,000 to 2,268,000 tons. American ships were then carrying 70 per cent of our outbound cargoes, while our total tonnage of 5,299,000 nearly equaled that of Britain and her colonies, which amounted to 5,710,000.

Conditions of the time were favorable to American achievement in ship construction and operation. There was a long and honorable tradition of maritime greatness reaching back into colonial times. Large timbers were easily available. Raw materials generally were abundant. American shipwrights were unsurpassed; labor was efficient; owners and operators were closely associated with builders, being often united in the same person; foreign demand for American carriers was brisk. In these days Americans were producing more ton-miles for a dollar than any other nation. American shipping laws were favorable; foreign government reports admitted the superiority of American crews. Sailors were often college men; training in navigation was highly developed; American captains were often part owners and were on the whole better educated than those of England. America of that day was ship-minded; youths took avidly to seafaring careers; substantial citizens took pride in each new shipping triumph. Philip Hone, seeing an American packet ship launch on her maiden voyage, thought that John Bull would be knocked in half by Yankee naval magnificence, and called to mind Tocqueville’s prediction that the Americans were born to rule the seas.{19} Though much has been said of the clipper, other types constituted the bulk of the nation’s tonnage. Ship for ship—clipper or ordinary merchantmen—the United States dominated the commerce of the world.{20}

Expansion in industry and transportation was naturally accompanied by expansion in American cities. While the country as a whole increased in population in the fifties by 35 per cent, and while rural sections increased 30 per cent, the cities showed an increase of 75 per cent. America’s largest city in 1850 was New York with its population of 515,000. New York and Brooklyn together had 612,000; next came Philadelphia with 340,000; Baltimore was third with 169,000; Boston fourth with 136,000; Chicago twentieth with 29,000. The census of 1860 revealed enormous changes wrought in ten years: New York and Brooklyn now had 1,080,000 souls; Philadelphia 565,000; Baltimore 212,000; Boston 177,000; Cincinnati 161,000; St. Louis 160,000; and Chicago, having trebled its population, stood ninth with 109,000. Municipal improvements—street cars and subterranean railways, pavements, Sidewalks, water works, and sanitary systems—were actively pushed during the decade. It is true that New York was just emerging from the period when pigs wandered about on Broadway in full enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;{21} but the tempo of such emergence in New York and elsewhere was of breathtaking rapidity, and urban America was holding its head high in comparison with Europe.

Though wealth abounded in the fifties, it was inequitably distributed and much of it was insecurely grounded. The two factors that seem most striking in the business world of the time were prosperity that reached boom proportions and panic which broke in 1857, bringing paralysis to industry and misery to thousands. The business shock was both financial and industrial. James Buchanan attributed the malady entirely to our vicious system of paper currency and bank credits, exciting the people to wild speculations and gambling in stocks;{22} but the true explanation was found in a variety of interrelated factors such as undue expansion, excessive railroad building, speculative real estate booms, bubbles of business excitement resulting from gold discoveries, enormous loans, insecure banknotes, and rampant greed in the scramble for quick fortunes. In the one year 1857 liabilities in business failures in the United States amounted to $291,000,000.{23} It is significant that the failures in New York City and Brooklyn amounted to $135,000,000, showing how fully the metropolis had become the business and financial hub of the nation. In the South the failures amounted to only $26,000,000, of which amount 60 per cent belonged to the states of Louisiana, Missouri, and Maryland. These figures, however, must be read in the light of the small amount of industrial enterprise in the South; and they offer no measure of losses by thousands of Southern citizens owing to Northern failures.

The human aspects of the panic were seen in the struggles of bankrupt individuals with debts and foreclosures, in the forty thousand who were thrown out of work in New York City, in shivering crowds of city beggars, in violent hunger demonstrations, in decreased immigration, in the unrecorded misery that affected the working class, and in consequent labor unrest. The United States had in the fifties no national labor organization. Solidarity of feeling and comprehensive organization in the labor world were but little developed. The unionism of the period, an outgrowth of a movement dating chiefly from the presidency of Jackson, proceeded along local lines and by crafts; it did not embrace the great army of unskilled workers. Yet some of the earmarks of modern labor turbulence were evident in the insistence upon collective bargaining, in strikes and walkouts, in capitalists’ counter organizations, in employers’ appeals to the courts, in labor parades, in the use of troops to suppress labor opposition, and in the dismissal of a New England pastor for showing sympathy with strikers.

3

On the motives and tendencies manifest in the field of literature adequate comment is impossible within the space limitations of the present volume. The forties and fifties were the golden age of romanticism. Voices in literature were positive and vibrant; spirits were buoyant; production was prolific. Cynical sophistication was conspicuously lacking; and sentimental moralizing classics of the Longfellow type were the characteristic output of the time. Not a few of the prominent writers were women; as to lesser authoresses and poetesses...they [were] legion. The vast number were sparrows, said Miss Bremer, with only here and there a thrush but never the full inspiration of the nightingale.{24}

The chief Southern writer, Edgar Allan Poe, died just before the decade opened (1849), but his gloomy Gothic style continued to be imitated by scores of later writers. The Middle States were also losing literary leadership. One of the most important figures in the history of the American novel, James Fenimore Cooper, whose ponderous triteness was as much a national characteristic as his fondness for authentic American settings, died in 1851. The supreme writer of the older school, Washington Irving, lived nearly through the decade (until November 28, 1859), but, unfortunate in his choice of themes, he had turned from those Knickerbocker chronicles and legendary sketches which constituted his forte to such heavy tasks as the two-volume life of Goldsmith and the monumental life of George Washington in five volumes. With the passing of Irving and Cooper, hegemony was shifting to Concord, Beacon Street, and Cambridge; and the genteel sway of New England immortals had by the close of the fifties reached its most impressive stage.

By 1860 Longfellow had produced his best-known poems and had obtained fame as a lovable lecturer in the Smith professorship of modern languages at Harvard. James Russell Lowell had served as first editor of the Atlantic Monthly (established in 1857), had produced The Vision of Sir Launfal, The Biglow Papers, and many other poems, and was Longfellow’s successor in the Harvard chair. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, witty, gently satirical, guiltless of the Puritan’s dour seriousness, had achieved notably in both medicine and literature, had assisted Lowell in making the Atlantic, and had given to the world the Autocrat, the Professor, and enough lyrics to make him poet laureate of Boston. Emerson, approaching sixty, had issued the first and second series of his Essays and had produced the greatest of his lectures. His Concord neighbor Hawthorne, one of the finest of America’s creative spirits, still lived, but his work was nearly finished. In 1850 had appeared The Scarlet Letter; in 1860 The Marble Faun; and in intervening years The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and Tanglewood Tales. He was to live only till 1864, and in those few remaining years he was to be hastened to the grave by the black intolerance of civil war, the dishonoring of his political party, and the discrediting of his bosom friend, Franklin Pierce. Most original of the Concord group, Henry Thoreau had nearly completed in the Walden groves his fearless quest for the verities of life. To the individualistic nonconformity of the transcendentalists he had given a bold economic and spiritual interpretation; and for the restless urge to acquire riches he had substituted the simplest of lives in a cabin. Perhaps more than any other writer of his age he adopted a manner of living in accord with his teaching. In particular he made a daily application of Christian principles which was startling. Almost the equal of Lowell and Holmes in his early service to the Atlantic, John Greenleaf Whittier, Quaker bard and abolitionist poet, had by 1860 produced a whole literature of antislavery sermons in verse, had blazoned the craftsman’s virtues in Songs of Labor, and, in the lines of Parson Avery and Skipper Ireson, had turned some of the neatest phrases of American balladry.

The journalism of the time was highly developed. Whether judged by the standard of literary merit, of personal force and picturesqueness, or of capitalistic enterprise, the editor-proprietors of the fifties were men of mark. By 1859 William Cullen Bryant had completed three remarkable decades as editor of the New York Evening Post and was destined to hold this position of eminence for nearly two decades more. Under his leadership, powerfully aided by the work of Parke Godwin, the Post grew steadily not alone as a daily newspaper of high reportorial and editorial tone, but even more as a medium of liberal thought. Of quite different breed than Bryant was James Gordon Bennett the elder (1795-1872), one of the boldest and coarsest spirits in American journalistic annals. Denounced by a Whig enthusiast as an impudent disturber of the public peace,{25} Bennett lashed out savagely against reformers and scoffed at causes and crusades. Sparing neither pains nor expense in his ruthless search for news, he made his New York Herald one of the most widely read of the cheap dailies. With no scruples against the exploitation of scandal he conducted his sensational sheet somewhat along the lines of the yellow journal of a later day.

Bennett’s chief rival, Horace Greeley, had by 1860 made the Tribune a national institution. Animated by enthusiasms that tended toward fanaticism, and marred by personal eccentricities that laid him open to ridicule, this Yankee printer had risen from stark poverty to influence and power; and, as supporter of the Whig and later the Republican party, had demonstrated in area widely distant from his sanctum the tremendous force of political journalism. With defects of character that were to grow with the years, he showed the finer idealism of his ardent nature in efforts to improve the workingman’s lot, in generous support of movements for popular education, and in championship of progressive social movements generally. Charles A. Dana, Greeley’s able teammate on the Tribune, George Jones and Henry J. Raymond of the Times, Thurlow Weed, political boss in New York and proprietor of the Albany Evening Journal, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican, Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune, Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Whig, Robert Barnwell Rhett of the Charleston Mercury, George W. Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune, and George D. Prentice of the Louisville Journal were but a few of the many other prominent journalists of this age, when newspapers were more than commercialized corporations and when the personality of the editor-proprietor was as essential as the very name of the paper.

4

In American thought and philosophy modern tendencies were struggling with orthodoxy, and conspicuous thinkers were notable for their liberal and optimistic humanitarianism. It was a day of intellectual renascence whose most memorable element was the flowering of transcendentalism. From Emerson’s serene study at Concord there issued, in exalted stanzas that were essays and in essays that were poetry, a notable body of writings that scorned system but, as Carlyle said, stretched far beyond all systems. Having broken with orthodoxy by resigning his pastorate in Boston because he could not conceal disbelief in traditional creeds, Emerson’s emancipated spirit soared through a career that was spared the bitter-ness of most idealists. It was given to him to prove that a philosopher could reach the heights in intellectual adventuring and yet keep in tune with his times. His books were avidly read in America and abroad; distinguished men and women found their way to his home; and in language chaste, strong and vigorous{26} he unfolded to admiring lecture audiences his philosophy of confident individualism. The universal soul, one mind common to all revealing itself in each individual’s reaction, was his theme. Self-reliance, readiness to believe one’s own thought, to watch that gleam that flashes across the mind, he counted real genius. To realize the divine in every man, to be a nonconformist, with virtues that were more than penances, to discard usages that signified slavery to sect or party, was his religion. Consistency he called the hobgoblin of little minds. To be great, he said, is to be misunderstood. Scorning an armchair philosophy he warned that our culture must not omit the heroic. With perfect urbanity to dare the gibbet and the mob, to have contempt for safety and be negligent of life and danger, was the sterner motif of his teaching.{27} Though keeping somewhat aloof from extravagant social experimentation he held an open mind toward each new crusade and became the guiding genius not only of transcendental thinking (which he modestly disavowed) but also of solid humanitarian reform. Trained in moral self-discipline, scion of ministerial families, he was the supreme product of Puritanism; but in his person the Puritan soul revealed itself in spiritual strength and insight rather than in self-righteous conformity. To know the best in New England character it must be remembered that there were many lesser Emersons and that he stands in American cultural history not only as philosopher and guide but as sample of a type. Had it been otherwise there could never have been so ready a welcome for his writings.

In the field of pure science the United States could point to the work of Asa Gray in botany, of Joseph Henry in physics, of Joseph LeConte in geology, of Matthew Fontaine Maury in oceanography, of James Dwight Dana in mineralogy, and of Louis Agassiz in natural history and geology. Savants in America were abreast of the latest developments in scholarship; often the literary men were half-scientists; and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), so disturbing to those who staked their religious faith on a matter-of-fact misinterpretation of the Biblical story of creation, found a ready sale which caused the first American edition to be quickly exhausted.

In their hunger for mental stimulus Americans of the time eagerly formed their lecture programs and lyceum bureaus. Reaching remarkable proportions in the fifties the lecture movement satisfied the American craving for amusement, supplied a well-nigh universal demand for intellectual improvement, and catered to the American wish to gaze upon celebrities in the flesh. Though mere notoriety would draw a crowd, and though one of the most famous of professional lecturers (John B. Gough) was described as an evangelical comedian whose contortions were tolerated for the sake of his drollery;{28} the performances of such figures as Emerson, Parke Godwin, Thoreau, Thackeray, Fanny Kemble [Butler], the Shakespearean reader, and George William Curtis, were of distinguished excellence. The American talent for organization expressed itself in lecture chains under central management, with connections reaching far into the pioneer West. Popular interest in things of the mind found expression not only in attendance at lectures but in numerous local literary societies, in organizations for historical or philosophical study, and in a lively sale for books. Public libraries were few;{29} but the Astor Library in New York illustrated the use of private fortunes for the endowment of institutions intended to raise the general intellectual level.

In the field of education, especially popular extension of education by government support, the period witnessed steady advance. The educational credo of America was epitomized by an English traveler in the fifties under the following four heads:

1st. That a general diffusion of education is essential to the success of republican institutions.

2nd. That it is the duty of the State governments to insist on provision being made for it.

3rd. That all sectarian teaching must be excluded in national seminaries [i.e., where education by government support is involved].

4th. That the Christian sects, if consistent and conscientious, should attend to the religious tuition of all the members of the community, both young and old.{30}

Though there were some dissenters, general assent was given to the concepts of Horace Mann, to whom the common school was an essential of democratic society not alone for its enlightenment of citizens but also for its tendency to obliterate class distinctions. Through the work of the state board of education of which he was president he had introduced revolutionary changes into the common school system of Massachusetts, placing that commonwealth in the forefront in that phase of educational development and producing widespread results by emulation in other states. By a movement started through his influence and pushed against the opposition of pedagogues, sectarians, and social conservatives, the United States advanced to the point where by 1860 its citizens were deemed the most generally educated and intelligent people on the earth.{31} The extent of public school enterprise may be measured by the fact that in 1852 there were 862,000 children attending common schools in New York; 492,000 in Pennsylvania; 90,000 in Vermont; 152,000 in New Jersey; and 199,000 in Massachusetts.{32} The South, a relatively poorer region with a scattered population and bad roads, lagged behind the rest of the country, but it too was making enormous educational progress in the 1850’s. North Carolina, under the prodding of Calvin J. Wiley, the first superintendent of education, established 3000 schools which enjoyed an annual revenue of $279,000; Alabama spent $474,000 in 1856 for the education of 90,000 students.{33}

Other significant educational tendencies paralleled the common school development. City high schools, emphasizing Latin and mathematics and conceived as fitting schools for the college or university, rapidly increased in numbers till in 1860 Massachusetts had seventy-eight; New York forty-one; and Ohio forty-eight.{34} In the South the place of the high school was taken by the secondary schools known as academies. In 1850 there were 3000 academies in the South; a state as new as Arkansas had 90 such institutions.{35} All over the nation institutions for teacher training were considerably extended. In all sections of the country, too, there was an increasing number of colleges. Ohio in 1861 had seventeen that were to be permanent; Pennsylvania sixteen; New York fifteen; Illinois twelve; and the United States as a whole 182. In addition, there were many others that have not survived the years. Religious ascendancy in the college world was at a high stage. Yale was a little temple with prayer and praise...the delight...of the students; atheism was in retreat; and the forces of irreligion, of rationalism, and of deistic thought were effectually checked on a hundred fronts.{36} Of the permanent denominational colleges founded before the Civil War the Presbyterians had the greatest number (forty-nine), having captured various institutions (e.g., Illinois College) launched under Congregational leadership. Next came the Methodists with thirty-four; the Baptists with twenty-five; the Congregationalists with twenty-one; the Catholics with fourteen; the Episcopalians with eleven. No other sect had more than six destined for permanency.

Separation of church and state having been worked out in the older states after famous struggles, the principle of such separation was fixed by constitutional provision in the twenty-one new states admitted before the Civil War, with the double result that state universities were now non-sectarian, while each denomination felt that it must take care of the training of its ministers and also of both the religious and secular education of its college youth. Twenty-one state universities had been established (in twenty of the thirty-four states) prior to the Civil War; some of the more notable being those of Georgia (1785), North Carolina (1789), Virginia (1819), Indiana (1828), Michigan (1837), Missouri (1839), and Wisconsin (1848). To aid this movement Federal land grants had been voted by Congress, Tennessee receiving 100,000 acres, Wisconsin 92,000, Missouri 46,000, and most of the other states the same amount as Missouri. The content of college education is suggested by the courses which John Hay took at Brown University between 1855 and 1858, which consisted of chemistry, mathematics, rhetoric, physics, Latin, Greek, French, German, moral philosophy, declamation, history, intellectual philosophy, and political economy. Another phase of college life in a democracy was illustrated by the "horror...of the members of rival fraternities when they saw Hay come into chapel...wearing the Shield with the...letters θ∆X, emblazoned on its sable field."{37}

5

It was an age when women were preferred as angels rather than amazons, home-makers rather than careerists; yet considerable advance was being made in the direction of woman’s rights. Early aspects of feminism in America are usually associated with a famous incident at the World’s Anti-Slavery Conference in London in 1840 when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, duly chosen American delegates, were denied participation though permitted to observe and listen behind a screen in the gallery. In protest against this rebuff William Lloyd Garrison declined to speak as scheduled, but in a beautiful gesture took his place beside his sisters in the cause. In July of 1848 under the promotion of Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton there was held at Seneca Falls the notable convention which inaugurated the woman’s rights movement in the United States. In many fields women were advancing toward equality with men. Already, in strong contrast to England and the continent, the profession of elementary teaching was becoming a feminine affair. Mrs. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, educated at Oberlin, was preaching at South Butler, New York. Elizabeth Blackwell, having tried to practice medicine in New York City, was doing needful work through the New York Infirmary and College for Women. Margaret Fuller, Dorothea Dix, Fanny Wright, and many others were demonstrating the aptitude of women in the fields of literature and social reform. Codes were being liberalized to give women fuller legal rights. James Silk Buckingham, eminent British traveler, found women in America always equal to the men, and often superior to them, in the extent of their reading and the shrewdness of their observations.{38} Slender beginnings were made in woman suffrage by the action of Kentucky in giving widow-mothers a limited vote in school elections. Women’s colleges of the modern type were just beginning to take the place of the older female academies and finishing schools; but the movement had only been launched. Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837; but other famous women’s colleges of the North belonged to a later time: Vassar was founded in 1861; Radcliffe in 1879; Smith in 1871; Wells in 1868; Barnard in 1889; Bryn Mawr in 1880. In the South Elizabeth Female Academy, a Methodist school at Old Washington in Mississippi, was chartered as a college in 1819, and in 1836 the Georgia Female College (now Wesleyan College) was authorized to give degrees.{39}

Toward the more striking forms of feminism, sentiment was unfavorable. Male leaders often refused to speak on the same platform with women; Bennett of the New York Herald insisted that women’s votes should be polled only at the tea table; and more than a half-century was to elapse before equality at the polls was to be made nation-wide.

Reformers found many sore spots in the social body; and in its humanitarian striving the period was marked by the variety and intensity of its movements. In temperance and liquor control, in the days before the W.C.T.U. and the National Prohibition party, the assault upon the demon rum was conducted by local temperance societies, campaigns of public education through lecturers and tracts, and prohibitory or licensing laws passed in the states. In 1851 Maine enacted state prohibition of the liquor traffic, and temperance forces soon succeeded in obtaining laws for some type of liquor control or prohibition in Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Delaware, and Tennessee, though in some cases (e.g., in Illinois and Indiana) the experiment was abandoned soon after it was launched. This aspect of the movement may be largely traced to the vigorous efforts of Neal Dow, father of the Maine law and pioneer advocate of legislative prohibition. Urged by temperance songs and novels, by the popular agitation of such a lecturer as John B. Gough, and by the work of a crusading band of reformed drunkards known as the Washingtonians, Americans of the period were becoming increasingly conscious of the physiological and social evils of drink. One feature of the crusade was the struggle for abolition of grog and cat from the navy of the United States. The cat-o’-nine-tails was abolished in the fifties; but spirits remained a part of the sailor’s ration till the next decade.

There was alarm over lax Sunday observance, among foreign-born groups especially; and religious leaders were showing militant opposition to the activity of saloons and places of questionable amusement on the Sabbath day. One of the most persistent crusades was the movement led by Dorothea Dix for better treatment of the indigent insane by the removal of such unfortunates from prisons and for their special treatment in institutions provided for the purpose. The efforts of Miss Dix brought success in the form of state insane asylums; but when in 1854 she procured the passage by Congress of a national law granting ten million acres of public land to the states for this purpose, thus offering a cause in which land speculators and philanthropists found a mutual opportunity,{40} the bill met defeat through the veto of President Pierce, who braved humanitarian opposition in his refusal to make the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States.

For many another crusade there was a Dorothea Dix or a Neal Dow. Nor were these movements always separate and distinct. The causes of the time beat often in the same breast. Charles Stuart, active in the antislavery movement, wrote to Theodore Dwight Weld in 1831: Let me hear from you—about you—about Finney—Revivals—Temp[erance] ‘Joe’—The Negroes—The missionaries and Indians in Georgia—The Colonization Society—The free coloured people—your family—Oneida Academy etc....{41} In prison reform, in charitable organization, in the cleaning up of tenements, in subscriptions to relieve foreign distress, in the efforts of S. G. Howe for relief of the blind, in societies for international peace, in utopian experiments such as Brook Farm and the Amana community in Iowa, the impulse to remake human society and stamp out social evils was finding increasing expression.

6

Though all these humanitarian crusades flourished chiefly in the wealthier and more populous Northern states, only one of these reform drives was confined to a single section, the antislavery movement. It had not always been so. In the early days of the republic George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry had made known their opposition to Negro slavery, and many other Southerners had looked toward the gradual eradication of the peculiar institution. Antislavery activities in the first decades of the nineteenth century had known no sectional lines. The American Colonization Society, which sought to expatriate free Negroes to Africa, drew its support from all sections of the country and from all classes of men—slaveholders and non-slaveholders, proslavery and antislavery advocates.{42} But by the 1830’s the Southern states had come to believe that slavery was the necessary basis of their section’s economy and, what is even more important, that it was the only way in which the allegedly inferior Negro race could be kept in subordination.

At the same time an important transformation was occurring in Northern antislavery opinion. It is customary to date abolitionism (by which is meant the demand for the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of all slaves) from 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison founded his Liberator in Boston, but in fact Garrison’s outbursts were only a part of a new and increasingly strident Northern attack upon the South’s peculiar institution as a relic of barbarism and a species of sin. In discussing the rise of abolitionism many non-Garrisonian factors, especially evident in New York, Ohio, and the West generally, must be brought into the picture, such as the evangelistic labors of C. G. Finney, the organizing efforts and financial contributions of Arthur and Lewis Tappan, the reverberating effects of a notable debate among the students at Lane seminary (Cincinnati, 1834), the withdrawal of zealous antislavery students from Lane and their removal to Oberlin College, and the widespread antislavery agitation conducted by Theodore Dwight Weld. Garrison was primarily a free-lance agitator-journalist who offended